“The Cottage” at Hartford Stage
Robert Schneider in Hartford, Connecticut
9 February 2026
★★★☆☆
It’s not generally appreciated that dramatic credibility, which is absolutely crucial in the performance of tragedy, becomes even more important when it comes to farce. The whole mad machinery of farce runs on causality. When it ceases to be clear that the characters are mere cogs and wheels in an unbreakable clockwork of circumstance, that every atom of ridiculous behaviour follows some earlier atom with syllogistic precision, credibility is lost and the machine stops. What starts out as honest comedy becomes a tiresome display of silliness.
Photo credit: T Charles Erickson.
Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage at Hartford Stage is a case in point. Her premise is intriguing: Rustin had been cast in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever and wanted to recreate the mad energy of the genre while adding up-to-date, fully-empowered female characters. With somewhat unnecessary precision, she sets her play on the morning of June 4, 1923 in an English country cottage. The institutions are still male-dominated and female suffrage is five years in the future.
The intricate set was designed by Timothy Mackabee; I counted six cigarette cases distributed around the stage, all disguised as knick-knacks of one kind or another. Hunter Kaczorowski’s period costumes add to the fun.
The women in The Cottage, however, are fervent feminists of the late 70s strain personified by Jill Clayburgh’s character in An Unmarried Woman. Accordingly, Sylvie (Mary Cavett) offers herself a once-a-year tryst with her lover, Beau (Jordan Sobel) because sex with her husband, Clarke (Craig Wesley Divino) doesn’t satisfy her. Eventually we learn that Clarke and Beau are brothers and the cottage belongs to their mother. Although ignorant of his wife’s annual dalliance, Clarke has regularly been having sex with Beau’s wife, Marjorie (Kate MacCluggage). These rendezvous were easy to arrange because Beau has been further occupied by a second mistress, not his sister-in-law but a dim-witted floozy named Dierdre (Jetta Juriansz). While Beau dallied with Dierdre, Clarke impregnated Marjorie who is now in her eighth month.
So far, so good. The first act goes quickly by as this intricate cascade of infidelities is gradually and amusingly revealed. There is more than enough material for a play here. Coward did wonders with only a single set of estranged spouses having found new loves. The pseudo-posh English accents, largely of the Terry-Thomas variety, are excessive but mostly comprehensible.
The second act, however, goes off the rails. A new character is introduced (Matthew J. Harris) whose name (it’s either Richard or William) and relationship to the other characters is never satisfactorily explained. Nor is it entirely clear why he has come to the cottage with a long-barrelled Colt revolver.
“Build it and break it” is a fundamental technique of comedy. Two characters build up to an enormous row but break it off when a third character offers them tea. A pregnant woman feels she is going into labour and causes a great stir, but she only produces an ear-splitting, 30-second fart. Deirdre who has voiced nothing but inanities throughout the play, suddenly says something eloquent, apt and profound. “Build it and break it” is very funny if used judiciously, but when over-used it saps the vitality of the play. The framework of make-believe that supports the gags breaks down and can’t be rebuilt.
Clarke, preparing to do battle with Richard (or William) belts on pillows front and back. As a defence against William’s (or Richard’s) revolver, the pillows are absurd, but they are very useful when the actor proceeds to trip on the upstairs landing and roll down the stairs. The pratfall is funny when it happens, but the contrivance is quickly apparent: if he wasn’t intending to roll down the stairs, why the pillows? And if he was intending to roll down the stairs, to what end except to make the audience laugh? They pretend we won’t notice or won’t mind, but we do mind. And when Beau joins the fray armed with an egg beater, does it add to the hilarity or further take from our ability to pretend that some kind of fight is going on?
Unfortunately, author Rustin and director Zoë Golub-Sass return to this proverbial well far too often. The problem was stated well in 1895 when the greatest critic of the age went to see the greatest comedy of the century:
“I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it; and that is why, though I laugh as much as anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits before the end of the second act, and out of temper before the end of the third, my miserable mechanical laughter intensifying these symptoms at every outburst. If the public ever becomes intelligent enough to know when it is really enjoying itself and when it is not, there will be an end of farcical comedy. Now in The Importance of Being Earnest there is plenty of this rib-tickling: for instance, the lies, the deceptions, the cross purposes, the sham mourning, the christening of the two grown-up men, the muffin eating, and so forth. These could only have been raised from the farcical plane by making them occur to characters who had, like Don Quixote, convinced us of their reality and obtained some hold on our sympathy. But that unfortunate moment of Gilbertism breaks our belief in the humanity of the play…”
Bernard Shaw was famously wrong about The Importance of Being Earnest, every moment of that play makes sense in its own, special, topsy-turvy way. But he was quite right about farcical comedy. Despite its many amusing moments, The Cottage proves his point.
